Should You Think About Technique When Competing? — SS #11

Have poor technique?

You’re setting a strong ceiling on your potential playing level.

Most players understand this to a degree, which is why there is so much focus on the technical elements in tennis.

But if you’ve ever found yourself in the middle of an important match, obsessing over your grip or swing path, you’re setting yourself up for a sub-par performance.

Sure, there are minor cues you can give yourself to help you perform your best. However, if you’re out there thinking, “I need to make sure I’ve got enough spacing on my forehand because that was what I did in my last lesson with my coach,” and it’s 30–30 and 3–3, then you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

The key to your best performance lies in trusting your training and letting your brain do what it’s been trained to do. You want to reduce internal interference and play in an automatic state.

The Big Caveat

There’s a significant caveat here, and it relates to making permanent changes in your game. It’s important to understand when and how you should be thinking about technique during matches.

Brain Memory, Muscle Memory, Motor Programs

When you practice, you’re building myelin around neural pathways. We’ve covered this in length in previous issues of The Short Set. You’re basically building what will be automatic. Your automatic motor programs allow your body to perform complex movements—like a forehand—without conscious thought.

During a match, overthinking your technique can disrupt this process, leading to excessive errors, “paralysis by analysis,” and just poor play in general. (This is a pretty simplistic way of explaining things, and I’ve actually explored what the sports psychology literature notes in this issue.) But if I were to summarize 1,800 words into one sentence, it would be this: It’s extremely challenging to consistently strike the ball well if you’re overthinking technique.

Focus on Strategy—Not Technique

So, what should be your focus during competitive matches? Instead of concentrating on the minutiae of your technique, shift your focus to your strategy. Think about your opponent's weaknesses, how you can exploit them, and your targets.

Think about it this way:

What you start your match with is what you have to work with.

If you’ve paid attention to my writing on how long it takes to make permanent changes to your game, you’ll know that it’s silly to think that you can “change” your forehand in the middle of a match.

Meaning, if you’ve trained your brain to contact the ball a little too close to your body on your forehand, you don’t want to be spending your time during a match focusing on making that correction.

The time for that is practice and in practice matches.

The Balance Between Practice and Competition

There’s a time and place for focusing on technique: during practice sessions and practice matches. This is where you should meticulously work on your strokes, footwork, and other technical aspects. When it’s time to compete, your focus should be on strategy and adapting your gameplan to your opponent.

Cues and Ideas You Can Use

That being said, there are certain pseudo-technical cues you can utilize. But try and keep things extremely simple:

1. Targets: Focus on where you want to hit each ball. Instead of thinking, “I have to do x, y, z,” just think, “cross-court.”

2. Starting Patterns: Where will your first serve go? Where will your third shot go off your opponent’s return? If you’re returning: where is your opponent going to serve? Where will you place the return?

3. Mental Cues: Use simple, positive cues such as “breathe,” “exhale,” or “eyes at the hit.”

4. Serve: “Keep the hand, elbow, and shoulder relaxed,” “The contact is the target, not the court.”

5. It Is What It Is: Remind yourself that what you walk on the court with is what you have to work with. There’s no point in beating yourself up if you didn’t have the time to work on changing your forehand. It is what it is when you walk onto the match court. Your job is to compete and fight to the best of your abilities that day.

So, should you think about technique when competing?

The answer is generally no.

Now Here’s the Big Caveat

Can you spend matches worrying and focusing on technique?

Is it possible to play this way?

Yes. Absolutely.

In fact, if you want to make a change permanent sooner in your game, then the struggle that comes with trying to execute that technical change during a match is what will help you to solidify the change in your game.

However, if this is going to be your approach, you should severely curb your expectations for how you’re going to perform in your matches

Don’t expect to play anywhere near your “normal” level if you’re trying to make a change in your technique during a match.

But know that approaching change in this way will mean that you solidify the changes much faster.

Think back to The Pie Chart of Permanence.

If you’re executing the change three times, but on the 4th (in matches), you’re not thinking about it, it will take a little longer to make that change permanent as opposed to if you give up expectations, kill your ego, and just worry about playing and hitting the ball the “right way.”

This is actually one of the reasons players stay at the same level for ever. You are scared of getting worse while you go through the difficult process of changing, and you’re too worried about losing to your friend, Bob.

But that’s a topic for another day.

Good luck, and as always, let me know if you have any questions.

When you’re ready, if you want personalized advice on how to approach match play while making technical changes, book in with me for a Virtual Private Lesson.

My best,
Malhar

P.S. I value your feedback! Let me know what you think of today’s issue, or suggest topics you’d like to see covered in future editions.